The Alabama Secretary of State’s office has notified hundreds of thousands of voters that they need to update or verify their registration because records show they may have moved.

Laney Rawls, communications director for Secretary of State Wes Allen, said the notifications are part of the address confirmation program required by the National Voter Registration Act and by state law.

The intent is to identify voters no longer eligible to vote in Alabama because they have moved out of state, as well as voters whose voting place has changed because they moved to a different county.

The letters ask the recipients to respond within 90 days or face being asked to update their voter registration information the next time they vote.

“Your voter registration will be canceled if you do not update your voter registration or vote in an election up to or including the November 2028 general election,” the letter continues.

Their registration would be cancelled after the general election in November 2028.

Mitchell Brown, director of the Institute for Election Administration Research & Practice and a political science professor at Auburn University, said the voter roll updates are a necessary policy.

Brown said most people do not update their registration when they move. That leads to inaccurate and bloated voter rolls, Brown said.

“This is a good administrative practice and there is nothing nefarious going on,” Brown said.

‘A 3 year purge clock has started’

Rawls said the secretary of state’s office identified 432,964 registered voters who might have moved to another county or moved out of Alabama based on data reviewed by the office.

That’s about 12% of Alabama’s 3.8 million registered voters.

Rawls said the secretary of state’s office used two databases to identify possible movers — the U.S. Postal Service National Change of Address file and information from the Experian credit bureau’s TrueTrace system.

The letters to voters do not mention those databases but say, “We have received information that you may have moved to a new county or out of the state.”

The letters include a card and postage-paid envelope for voters to return, either to give their new address or to verify that they remain at the same address.

For voters who have moved out of state, the letters instruct them to call a phone number and cancel their Alabama voter registration.

Kathy Jones, president of the League of Women Voters of Alabama, said the use of the credit bureau is a poor way to identify people who have moved because they include old addresses and addresses of people who share joint credit cards.

Jones, who lives in Huntsville, said she recently received one of the letters from the secretary of state’s office.

“I’ve lived in the same place for decades. And I’ve voted in the same polling place for decades,” Jones said.

The LWVAL put an “urgent notice” about the letters on its Facebook page, saying, “A 3 year purge clock has started for you.”

“If you have a joint financial instrument (e.g., a credit card) with someone who doesn’t live in your home, your Experian credit report lists all addresses affiliated with that item,” the LWVAL said.

“This is why people think it is crazy for Secretaries of State to use credit agencies to do voter roll maintenance.”

In response to the criticism from the LWVAL, Rawls provided links to a study from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on the use of Experian’s system, called TrueTrace, to help update voter rolls, as well as the use of Experian by Orange County, California and West Virginia.

“The Secretary of State used Experian’s TrueTrace program to identify voters that likely moved to a new county in Alabama or to a different state,” Rawls said in an email.

“TrueTrace utilizes National Change of Address (NCOA) data, data from the Social Security Death Master Index, and credit data from all 50 states to return matches to Alabama voters with a more current address than their voter registration address.”

Allen opposes LWVAL ‘grifting attempts’

The LWVAL and Allen have been at odds before.

In August 2024, Allen announced an initiative to remove 3,000 people from the voting rolls because of records indicating they were not citizens.

The LWVAL was one of the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit challenging the voter purge.

It turned out that most of the people on the list were citizens.

The Department of Justice sued to stop the initiative, saying it violated the National Voter Registration Act because it was started within 90 days of the 2024 general election.

The DOJ later dropped the lawsuit under the Trump administration.

Also last summer, Allen accused the LWVAL of using “shady” methods to obtain voters contact information through a voter registration website. Jones said Allen’s claim was misleading and an attempt to promote a conspiracy that did not exist.

In a statement responding to the LWVAL’s criticism of the use of Experian data to identify voters who may have moved, Allen said:

“The League of Women Voters always opposes common sense measures like voter ID requirements, the SAVE Act, and any other item they view as part of a conservative agenda.

“No one is surprised that they are also complaining about the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which I am enforcing. The people of Alabama are tired of grifting attempts by the League and like-minded liberal organizations.”

‘We end up wasting money’

Under Allen’s predecessor, John Merrill, Alabama was a member of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a multi-state data-sharing system intended to keep voting rolls accurate.

Allen expressed distrust about sharing Alabama voters information with ERIC while running for office in 2022 and withdrew the state from it immediately after taking office.

Some other Republican-controlled states also left ERIC.

Merrill disagreed with Allen’s decision and said ERIC had worked well for Alabama and had helped identify 12 voter fraud cases in 2020, cases when people voted in another state and in Alabama.

Since taking Alabama out of ERIC, Allen has overseen the development of a new system called the Alabama Voter Integrity Database, or AVID.

AVID draws information from drivers license records, cross-checks of registration records with other states, the postal service National Change of Address files, the Social Security death index, and the Department of Homeland Security and immigration services.

Brown, the Auburn professor and director of the Institute for Election Administration Research & Practice, said ERIC was a “pretty efficient and accurate system.”

Brown said the important thing about the voter address updates is that they follow the federal law and provide people with the proper notices and timelines. She said bloated registration rolls have consequences.

“It means we end up wasting money because we plan for turnout that’s not going to happen,” Brown said.

“We print more ballots than we need. We do all kinds of things in our planning because we’ve got these inaccurate rolls.

“Cleaning voter registration rolls is an important thing,“ Brown said.

”And it is not in and of itself, an evil thing. Some people are making cleaning voter registration rolls a political rallying cry like we’re disenfranchising people by doing it.”

LWVAL President Jones it was a mistake for Alabama to pull out of ERIC and the use of the credit bureau information is a consequence that she said will lead to more voters being wrongly identified as having moved.

“Why would you walk away from something that’s proven?” Jones said. “But they did. That’s why we’re in this situation.”